Wednesday, 14 September 2016

Austrian court refers Max Schrems’s Facebook case to ECJ

Austrian student
Max Schrems’ high-profile class action case over Facebook’s privacy rules has
been referred to the European Court of Justice by Austria’s highest court.

The court in Luxembourg will now have
to decide whether Max Schrems can
bring a class action suit on behalf of European or even worldwide users of the
social network.

Mr Schrems launched a class action
suit against Facebook on
behalf of 25,000 other people in 2014, accusing it of having invalid privacy
policies and processing customer data illegally.

Facebook argued that the Austrian
court did not have jurisdiction over the case, which slowly worked its way up
the Austrian legal system before being referred to the EU’s top court. The
company argues that Mr Schrems is not a consumer but an activist and so cannot
legally represent other consumers.

Mr Schrems said he hoped the European
court would be “consumer friendly” when it decided the jurisdiction question,
praising it for having been so in previous cases. “Filing thousands of
individual lawsuits before thousands of courts would be an absurd exercise,” he
said.

Procedural
questions

A spokeswoman for Facebook said: “Mr
Schrems’s claims have twice been rejected on the grounds that they cannot
proceed as ‘class action’ on behalf of other consumers in Austrian courts. We
look forward to addressing the procedural questions presented to the [European
Court of Justice] to resolve these claims.”

The referral is the latest twist in a
five-year dispute between Facebook and Mr Schrems, which began when he was a
student and has already upturned data protection law in the EU. Mr Schrems
founded the organisation Europe v Facebook, which he is funding from small
donations from “many concerned citizens” across Europe.

In a landmark judgment last year, the
European Court of Justice struck down a crucial data transfer deal that allowed
the likes of Facebook and Amazon to
transfer personal data easily from the EU to the US, following a complaint from
Mr Schrems.

The court ruled that the deal was
invalid because the data of EU citizens were not sufficiently protected from US
spies. Edward Snowden,
the US National Security Agency whistleblower, praised Mr Schrems at the time,
saying he had changed the world for the better.

A separate legal method of
transferring data across the Atlantic – known as model contract clauses – is
also under question in a related case in Ireland, again involving Mr Schrems.
These clauses are relied on by 80 per cent of companies that transfer data from
the EU to the US, lawyers estimate.